It is not the bridge that unites two places, it is the bridge that creates them.

Martin Heidegger

The geopolitical reasoning proposed to address the Mexico-Guatemala cross-border region is based on the paradoxes of borders: on the one hand, they are political divisions that mark the limit of the exercise of sovereignty and the security of a nation-state. And on the other, they are lines of adjacency that generate local, legal and illegal exchanges that transcend the border, marking spaces of relationship that give rise to cross-border regions (Fuentes, 2017). Hence, any border is porous.

(From “Las Fronteras”, Julieta Fuentes, CentroGEO)

The CentroGEO-NEST forum is a working group or meeting where the two groups will invite researchers from their respective communities to discuss the Mexico-Guatemala cross-border region. The forum process begins with the development of the “program” or structure of the forum itself.

…initiatives have emerged that propose alternative ways of thinking about the border between Mexico and Guatemala, conceiving it not as a line of separation but as a space of strategic relationship that represents binational development opportunities at a local scale and is presented as a counterweight to the image of a uniform, conflictive and repressive border.

NEST also proposes the CentroGEO-NEST forum along these lines of “alternative ways of thinking”, conceiving of the traditional disciplinary borders “not as lines of separation, but as a space of strategic relationship”.